Fortunes of a "Flat"

Introduction: The following article concludes a series of three. The original article first appeared in the magazine "Sea Breezes" in 1947 and was written by John Sutton, the son of the skipper of the Mersey Flat "Protection". It is the story of a sailing flat which traded on the Mersey years ago and was the last to have her sailing rig dismantled. She then continued to trade as a motor launch. She has been moved off the Mersey to the Severn - a crew-member has left after one voyage...

The next day a young man of 32, who had been 12 years in the navy, came aboard, and this was his first job in civil life since he had been demobbed. He was a born sailor and just the man for the job we were going on. Now we were all set to make a start. This is the work we have to do. We sail up the river Wye - up the beautiful Wye Valley. It is nice to look at, but the tide is terrific. We run to a small jetty and load block stone which is carried down from the quarry on a long conveyor belt, down to the flat, and is dumped into the hold. It comes down so fast that 100 tons can be loaded in half-an-hour. After loading we come down the Wye and let go the anchor at the river mouth. On the next tide the anchor is hove up and we proceed up the River Severn.
All along the Severn is a sea wall, and this block is being used to repair and fortify it in different places, and this is the procedure as I have seen it. We sail up the Severn until we come to the place in the sea wall where the stone is required, the place being marked out by long stakes driven into the beach. Sometimes it is soft mud, sometimes it is all rock, the stakes having been made fast to lengths of iron which had been driven into the rock at low water. The idea is to time the run to get to the place just on the turn of the tide, run off so far, let go the anchor, drop the ship back alongside the stakes, and get a head-rope ashore as quickly as possible. Now she is being held off in the tide with the anchor down off the port bow and a long lead ashore off the starboard bow. For the next operation, a light anchor is bent on to a handy rope and sculled off the port quarter, and another handy rope is taken ashore off the starboard quarter, all the slack taken in all round and the flat held in the strong tide which is now running, until she grounds. The job needs to be well understood, for no time must be lost in getting her into position. We all had to start from scratch. None of us had done this kind of thing before, but after a time we got used to it and were able to do it in the dark, two big headlights having been fitted , one on either bow.
When the ship was dried out, as many as twenty men come aboard and man-handle the stone out of the holds on to the deck, and then over the side, and place it to form a breakwater to strengthen the sea wall, which alone is preventing the surrounding countryside from being flooded. When the stone has been discharged, the next worry is to get the flat off the beach as soon as possible; in fact as soon as she floats. It can be readily understood that the job cannot be done unless the weather is suitable. If there is any jump at all, it is not safe to go near the beach. There is always the danger of staving in her bottom. The tide which lifts you onto the beach may be a nice quiet one, but by the next one there may have been a great change in the weather.
Well, the cargo is out and it is lying on the inshore side of her, and we are waiting for the tide to get off again and keep our fingers crossed hoping that the weather holds good. All the moorings and the light anchor have been got aboard, all that is left out is the big anchor , way off the port bow, the idea being that as soon as she starts to float again the engine will be started up and we shall endeavour to heave her off the beach to the anchor. Sometimes we are caught napping by the weather, and instead of heaving off the anchor, the anchor hasn't held and it has been hove home without the flat coming off the beach, and quite a hectic time is had by all. With a bit of good luck, however, and lots of good management we manage to get her off and sail back to the Wye, let go the anchor and wait for the next flood, heave up, go up the Wye, load stone and start the whole crazy business again.
As far as seamanship goes the whole operation is crazy, but it is a very important job all the same, it being impossible to get the stone to the required places overland. I would like to say something about the type of anchor gear we have to work with. We have the old-fashioned flat's windlass, which has no gypsy, no brake - just a barrel round which three turns of the anchor chain are taken. When the anchor is let go, it has to be let go in a hurry over the barrel of the windlass as required, about 30 fathoms of chain (we are using three-quarter-inch chain and the anchor is supposed to weigh 8 cwt.). The chain is passed over the barrel to the far side of the windlass, then laid back and to across the fo'c'sle deck, the stopper, or devil's claw, being left in the hawsepipe to prevent the chain from running out. Now a piece of handy two-inch line is taken and made fast with a bow-line to a link in the chain, short up against the stopper, and wound on the barrel normally used for the barrel line. This is hove tight until the weight is taken off the stopper. When the "let go" order is given, the stopper is taken out, the line is out and the whole lot goes out in a hurry, the bight of the chain having been weather-bitted, after side of the windlass, to prevent all the chain running out of the box overboard.
On big spring tides the stone is taken up through the Severn bridge and the tide certainly "rips" through there all right. It is not safe to take the bridge until about quarter-of-an-hour before high water. The tide has to be seen to be believed. No words of mine could describe it. We were the only craft to go that far up the Severn while I was there, and each time we went up above the bridge all the way along the banks of the Severn everyone turned out to see us go by. Well, we travel on and on until we come to where the stone is wanted, but sometimes we don't dry out. We stay afloat in a bit of a channel alongside the river bank, but the same procedure of mooring goes on as before. Now this is when we get the well-known Severn bore. We are lying off to an anchor waiting for the tide to come back. We can hear it coming miles away before we can see it.. That is when I start the engine up and stand by and wait for the surge, and it is certainly some surge. We have been on big spring tides with 40 fathoms of chain out and the engine going full speed ahead against the bore, and the old flat has been going astern at quite a nice turn of speed. As the tide eases we gradually steam beck to the anchor, heaving up as we go. One night we had that much chain out the anchor must have buried itself in the sand and taken a good hold, and when we eventually got it home we found out the stock had broken. It's a wonder to me the windlass didn't go over her bow, the run of the tide was so strong it was pulling her head down and making her jump about a bit.
Well, this game had been going on until around midnight on Monday October 4, 1948. We came off the berth, after getting rid of the stone, well up the river Severn at a place called Longney Crib, when it came on a thick fog, and the Severn bore put her high and dry on top of a breakwater made of stout wooden poles, and there she stuck. To have seen her in the position she was when all the water had gone from her, it would have seemed incredible to think she could have been put there.
The old Protection is now in the hands of the salvage people. She looks a sorry sight with her head stuck high in the air, listed over about 15 deg. across those big wooden piles. I came home two days after and that is the last I saw of her. It would be very interesting to know what would happen to her, and very nice to hear she has been salved and is able to carry on with a very exciting job. The trouble is, she went ashore right on top of high water on the biggest tide of the year, 31.9 ft. The next tide gave 10 in. less in the table, and with all our efforts, even to the extent of rigging blocks and tackle astern and putting the hauling part on the windlass and working the engine full speed astern, she did not even budge.

Concluded

Did the "Protection" end up like this? In a WATERWAYS WORLD article published in January 1996, Jon H Talbot records that the banks of the Severn were strengthened by redundant barges being filled with stone and scuttled where there was a need to reduce erosion at the point where the River and the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal are less than a hundred yards apart. It would be interesting to know whether the "Protection" did indeed live up to her name and become part of the bank protection she had been engaged in building.